The March of Unreason: Science, Democracy, and the New Fundamentalism, by Dick Taverne. (OUP, £9.99)

Liberal Democrat peer Dick Taverne believes that "the neglect or distortion of evidence is dangerous to the health of society". His book is both a paean to "truth and accuracy" and an exposé of the corrupting "myths and distortions" that he thinks permeate modern discourse. In particular, Taverne accuses the green lobby of relying on "dogma and ideology".

The effect of this is to undermine democracy: "If irrationality prevails and respect for evidence is rejected, how can we resist religious fundamentalism and chauvinism and racism and all the other threats to a civilized society?" To illustrate this argument, he explores the case for and against alternative medicine, GM crops and organic farming. To question the latter today is, says Taverne, like questioning the "virtues of motherhood". But, he argues, exposure to low concentrations of many toxic chemicals can in fact be beneficial.

Many myths are indeed dispelled in this book, but to understand the causes of disillusionment with scientists a more subtle analysis is needed. This defence of science and enlightenment produces more heat than light.PD Smith

In the Heart of the Amazon Forest, by Walter Henry Bates. (Penguin, £4.99)

The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863) by Henry Walter Bates (Penguin, please note the order of his names) is widely regarded as one of the most memorable travel books ever written. Bates, who lived from 1825 to 1892 (not 1850-1918, as it says here), spent 11 years in the Amazon rainforest collecting some 15,000 specimens.

This extract gives a vivid evocation of Bates's experiences. He has a scientist's eye for details of flora and fauna, and a traveller's wonder for each new sight. Highlights include collecting turtle's eggs on an palm-fringed sandbank, his account of holding hands with natives to demonstrate how the current from an electric eel can travel through several people, and his invaluable advice to the unwary traveller who stumbles into a column of army ants with jaws like pincers: "Run for it."

But most memorable are his feelings on leaving this "Naturalist's Paradise" for the "murky atmosphere" and "slavish conventionalities" of Victorian England. Home, with its "factory chimneys and crowds of grimy operatives, rung to work in early morning by factory bells", had lost its attraction. Ideal reading for the daily commute.PDS

Jonathan Maitland had an eccentric mother. She went through a string of husbands and lovers, liked leopard-skin clothes and owned a fleet of Mercedes. She was also casually abusive, selfish and occasionally psychotic. When Maitland's friend Rachel Johnson told him that, gosh, he really should write a book about her, he was tempted.

But being a bloke and reticent about spilling just for the sake of it, he found a public service to hang it on. Mum owned old people's homes, and it seems there was a bit of embezzlement going on. Maitland, a TV investigative journalist, proves why he's worth his salary by driving to East Cheam, looking up some old articles on microfiche in the library and discovering that she stole from the old folks in her care. And that's it really.

It's not uninvolving, but those real life stories in Take a Break generally keep you hooked: it doesn't mean they have any literary worth. And then there's that title, which had women on the bus nodding at me sympathetically and leaving me feeling I should explain that it wasn't a self-help book and that, honestly, I had no issues with my mother.Nicola Barr

One hardly expects a 600-page tome on the English civil war to read like a thriller, but Purkiss states in her prologue her intention to write a different kind of history, to restore to the fore "a class of person whose historical significance is usually regarded as slight, but who lived and suffered through the war just as their more powerful contemporaries did".

So while there is plenty here on Charles (neurotic but oddly likable) and Cromwell, plus gripping re-enactments of confused battles, gross-out moments of botched disembowelments and brilliant detail of lead saints being turned into bullets, this is also history as "a guide to human nature". Women abound, as preachers, nurses, cooks, political ideologues, revealing the reality of life during a violent and desecrating war.

She is particularly brilliant on London, which reeks and roars with smells and sounds. The ending may not provide a cliffhanger (the king dies), but that doesn't stop this "people's history" being exactly what Purkiss intended: a seductive and gripping narrative that gives insight into humanity and into life - both past and present. NB

The Thames: A Cultural History, by Mick Sinclair. (Signal Books, £12)

This comes in the Landscapes of the Imagination series, and that's my main complaint: where's the imagination? The research is respectable - Shakespeare, Dickens, and Deyan Sudjic in rightful, righteous wrath over the "ski-jumps, skateboards and pillows", aka the "luxury" apartment blocks and office towers that stand as the walls of the corridor of greed now confining the Thames.

And it is not bad as a guidebook, both for river trips and for footpadding on and off those pedestrian paths so begrudgingly permitted on either side of the river: besides the usual tourist exhibits there are some you might otherwise pass by - Wapping Police Station's book of suicides, and Brunel's sedate railway bridge at Maidenhead as the subject of Turner's painting Rain, Steam and Speed (the urgency of industrialisation is in the bamboozled eye of the beholder).

But the soul is missing, as if Sinclair did not have time to stand on a bridge and stare on a winter day when the fog roils off the water like steam from a scalding bath, or on a wet autumn morning when the upstream floods challenge Bazalgette's embankments.Vera Rule